‘Have patience, Friend of all the World’ — Kim started at the title.  ’Would I had a few of the years that so irk thee.  I have proved thee in several small ways.  This will not be forgotten when I make my report to the Colonel Sahib.’  Then, changing suddenly into English with a deep laugh: 

’By Jove!  O’Hara, I think there is a great deal in you; but you must not become proud and you must not talk.  You must go back to Lucknow and be a good little boy and mind your book, as the English say, and perhaps, next holidays if you care, you can come back to me!’ Kim’s face fell.  ‘Oh, I mean if you like.  I know where you want to go.’

Four days later a seat was booked for Kim and his small trunk at the rear of a Kalka tonga.  His companion was the whale-like Babu, who, with a fringed shawl wrapped round his head, and his fat openwork-stockinged left leg tucked under him, shivered and grunted in the morning chill.

‘How comes it that this man is one of us?’ thought Kim considering the jelly back as they jolted down the road; and the reflection threw him into most pleasant day-dreams.  Lurgan Sahib had given him five rupees — a splendid sum — as well as the assurance of his protection if he worked.  Unlike Mahbub, Lurgan Sahib had spoken most explicitly of the reward that would follow obedience, and Kim was content.  If only, like the Babu, he could enjoy the dignity of a letter and a number — and a price upon his head!  Some day he would be all that and more.  Some day he might be almost as great as Mahbub Ali!  The housetops of his search should be half India; he would follow Kings and Ministers, as in the old days he had followed vakils and lawyers’ touts across Lahore city for Mahbub Ali’s sake.  Meantime, there was the present, and not at all unpleasant, fact of St Xavier’s immediately before him.  There would be new boys to condescend to, and there would be tales of holiday adventures to hear.  Young Martin, son of the tea-planter at Manipur, had boasted that he would go to war, with a rifle, against the head-hunters.

That might be, but it was certain young Martin had not been blown half across the forecourt of a Patiala palace by an explosion of fireworks; nor had he...  Kim fell to telling himself the story of his own adventures through the last three months.  He could paralyse St Xavier’s — even the biggest boys who shaved — with the recital, were that permitted.  But it was, of course, out of the question.  There would be a price upon his head in good time, as Lurgan Sahib had assured him; and if he talked foolishly now, not only would that price never be set, but Colonel Creighton would cast him off — and he would be left to the wrath of Lurgan Sahib and Mahbub Ali — for the short space of life that would remain to him.

‘So I should lose Delhi for the sake of a fish,’ was his proverbial philosophy.  It behoved him to forget his holidays (there would always remain the fun of inventing imaginary adventures) and, as Lurgan Sahib had said, to work.  Of all the boys hurrying back to St Xavier’s, from Sukkur in the sands to Galle beneath the palms, none was so filled with virtue as Kimball O’Hara, jiggeting down to Umballa behind Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, whose name on the books of one section of the Ethnological Survey was R.17.